Report from PRO Chris Tyerman – Race 1 (27th October 2024)
Basically a perfect first race day yesterday; dry track, sun out, not too hot and plenty of wind in time for the racing. It was a south westerly that just kept building, gusting to near 30 knots at times. Everyone was down a sail size or two by the end, and after a couple of sailors ended up in the bushes we had to shift the east mark a few meters further from the edge. We did most of our races on an L shaped clockwise course, with an upwind and downwind leg between Tram Trash and Pigswill, then changed to a counter clockwise reach-heavy course around the edges.
The races were loads of fun, with lots of duels and place changing happening. John ran away with the day but not by a mile, Luke and Greg both got a first, and second and third changed a lot in the production races. Performance was really fun too, almost all the races had the places shuffle on each lap and were pretty close. We had a few breakages cause some DNFs and DNSes unfortunately, I’m definitely going to have a close look at my kart before the next event
Report from PRO Chris Tyerman – Race 2 (10th November 2024)
The previous race day wasn’t looking spectacular on the forecast, but the wind starting out on the bottom side of the compass and the sunny day gave us the reliable sea breeze to make it a good day, with Keith, Scott, John, Rob, dad and myself as skippers. Three production, three performance. Good job winning the day in production dad, and well done to Scott getting the win in performance too.
Report from PRO Chris Tyerman – Race 3 (9th February 2025)
Thrills and spills last Sunday folks. Forecast swung from a scorcher to a pleasant day with some gusty fickle winds growing into a powerful southwester. We got a few races in before lunch and then a whole bunch after. John B and Steve T elected not to race (citing there being only two production karts) in spite of our protests and took turns scoring and sailing, which really spoiled those in performance karts with eleven races; thanks so much guys. John beat me in at least one of the races in his glass masted production kart, what a sailor!
The first races had some switchy conditions, and traversing the soft patch between Tram Trash and Pigswill seemed to require a different plan every time; Greg would get ahead by taking a big gybe while most tried to curve the downwind through the soft dirt, then on the next lap those that copied him just got to watch Jack hug the edge and get to Pig Swill first.
Further into the arvo the breeze really came in and had half of us on three metre sails. On my four I was almost losing it every time I gybed on the dial-up. One capsize from an oversize sail, and two more from a downhaul rope jamming a main block! A mainsheet jam can be scary, luckily no real scrapes though. Quite a few OCS-es that day, there was definitely a lot less time needed to go from the back corner to the start than many other days. A new course sent us through the Moguls toward Pigswill and straight over the bump there which gave us a fun little launch at the start of each race.
Report from PRO Chris Tyerman – Race 4 (23rd February 2025)
Yet another cracker of a race day yesterday, except this time no one had to unpack a five metre sail. John came up with the brilliant idea of alternating performance and production, but doing it in blocks of three (or two) races instead of one to minimise downtime. We ended up having sixteen races between us all, eight each; much easier to get a sail change done in time too. Wish I’d thought of this a few years ago.
We started with a clockwise L shaped course, with the outer mark at Tram Trash moved close to the western edge so as to make Pig Swill be more downwind. It might’ve been a little too close to the edge, or I should’ve approached wide, as I ended up faced backwards in a cloud of dust. Rob won that one.
The course was then altered into a counter clockwise race around the perimeter with an upwind leg to Tram Trash, though for a time the production karts had a very long dead downwind leg due to a strong shift to the west. Kinda wanted a go at gybing down the west-east leg, but it shifted back to a standard southwest by the time the performance karts were up. There was a bit of changing up in the finishes. Greg led me by the hand across the line in race four, Toby beat his dad in a couple of the laps, and Luke took the last race off John. Brilliant racing!
